


The Eyes of Emrys

by Sour_grape_Snape



Series: Eyes of Emrys [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anxiety, BAMF Merlin (Merlin), F/F, F/M, Harry Potter Needs a Hug, Harry Potter is a Little Shit, Harry Potter/Merlin Crossover, Hijinks & Shenanigans, M/M, Magic, eventual Harry Potter/Fred Weasley
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:20:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22774045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_grape_Snape/pseuds/Sour_grape_Snape
Summary: When Harry is on his last nerve searching for a solution for the Second Task and comes across a potion of questionable origin in a dusty old book, what else can he do but drink it? And who is this Emrys guy it speaks of anyway?
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Luna Lovegood/Ginny Weasley
Series: Eyes of Emrys [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1637284
Comments: 6
Kudos: 46





	The Eyes of Emrys

**Author's Note:**

> I'm super excited about this. This story was originally @SorcerersScones but then they put it up for adoption. I nearly died when she agreed to let me do this. So, many kudos to her and I hope you enjoy!

A warm silence like heavy silk enveloped the library. The golden flicker of magically sustained light gave the area a soft glow, which carried on even as curfew brought darkness to the room. One corner, however, remained lit. Harry Potter sat rigid in his chair, one hand in a white knuckled grip on his hair, the other holding a small, glass bottle. A rustle of paper as he turned a page in a voluminous book disturbed the silence. He further disrupted it by muttering under his breath.

“The Eyes of Emrys. Known for its use in medieval times for amplifying one’s magic to the point where both a focus and an incantation was deemed unnecessary. Very few accounts can be confirmed… bollocks. Who’s Emrys? Would it actually let me survive underwater?”

Harry looked speculatively at the small, dusty glass bottle in his hands. The potion was a violent gold, just like the book said it should be. The liquid glistened and rippled like a breeze on a lake, and Harry crashed back to the problem at hand: if he couldn’t find a way to survive underwater for an hour, he would lose what he “sorely missed” to the Black Lake. If the book was right, this tiny bottle could amplify his magic to the point where he could perform some transfiguration spell without having to learn it, or even know what he was doing. If, and only if, this little potion was true to the book, he could easily stay underwater. He shook the bottle slightly, watching it slosh back and forth. It was the same gold as his house colors, surely that was a sign! Anyways, he was out of options. What would Godric Gryffindor do?

The cork was hard to get off, stuck as it was by the gravity of ages long forgotten, but Harry couldn’t hesitate. In one swig he tossed back half the potion. He frowned when nothing happened immediately, and gazed back down at the open book.

Harry’s eyes were drawn to an asterisk at the bottom of the page, which stated:  
*The Eyes of Emrys potion should only be taken in doses of 5 drops or less. The effects of a larger dose are unprecedented and undocumented. The five-drop dose will stay in the imbibers system for a minimum of five years. Experimentation is not recommended.  
Harry froze. He read the sentence over, and over, and over once more just to be sure. Unprecedented and undocumented effects? He didn’t like his chances with that.

He wanted to sigh, because of course this would happen to him. It couldn’t just have been a nice solution. No – he had to be screwed over in the process. What sort of person puts vital information like this in an asterisk anyway? Hey, look at this nice gold potion! Oh, by the way, this is completely experimental and should be taken in ridiculously small doses - hope you didn’t discover that too late.

Then again, maybe he didn’t really have a leg to stand on. After all, he was the one who’d swallowed a mystery potion he’d found in a dusty, old tome of questionable origin. Why was he like this again? 

His fists clenched, and he slammed the book shut with a thump. The window beside him rattled, and somewhere in the back of his brain he registered that it must’ve been the wind. His worried reflection stared back at him in the darkened pane.

The rattling returned, but Harry would be a fool to think it was the wind. He turned back to the book, starting to think he had gone crazy. There was nothing that could rattle that window, there was no wind, no rain, and no one could’ve stood outside it. He had to calm down. He turned back to re-read the page, but his agitation was evident. In turning, he missed the reflection in the window. His eyes had morphed into a molten gold, and in a strong chink, the glass next to him shattered.

Harry panicked; surely that would’ve been heard. It was well past nine o’clock. He thought frantically that he should fix it, but before he could scramble for his wand, the pane was back together again.

He breathed heavily, staring past his reflection and out into the night. The night was calm, the library felt as calm and peaceful as ever. He hadn’t imagined that whole thing, had he?

No, he mustn’t have. Unless the potion he took was a hallucinogen, he had just performed accidental magic, something that hadn’t happened since the summer of third year.

Okay Harry, this is normal. This is totally normal. Don’t freak out. You’re a Gryffindor, right? Right?

Harry took a deep breath, leaning back in the tough library chair. A faint creak sounded as he rocked backwards, but soon he was losing balance. 

Oh shit

He tried to grab something, anything – his hands eventually reached the table, but as he used it to pull himself forward, it tipped too, sending his books, the rest of the potion (still uncorked) and his bookbag tumbling towards the ground.

Until they weren’t.

Harry gaped. He had somehow frozen the entire table and its contents mid-fall. He looked around – the ink was tilted halfway down the bottle, as was the potion, but neither moved. Harry took a deep breath and recorked the potion, snagged his quill and inkwell, and blinked.  
Without him ever meaning to, he had somehow stopped time altogether. He must’ve been mad; that was the only explanation. He really wasn’t great at Charms and he was pretty sure he could recall Flitwick saying that it was impossible to stop time. But no, as he began to calm, the table stopped its tilt and settled back on four legs. The two bottles were safely in his hands, and he loosened his dangerously tight grip on them before either could break.

By the time a heavy silence held reign over the area once more, Harry had settled into his chair.

Holy shit, he thought desperately, it actually worked. 

Obviously, something had happened to his magic, exactly as the book had said. For better or for worse, he seemed to be stuck with this new, volatile magic, and would have to learn to deal with it. The bottle, he noticed, was still in his hand.

The book hadn’t said anything about the Eyes of Emrys being legal, but it hadn’t said that it was illegal either, so that surely counted as a loophole. Plausible deniability or something, if the telly’s wisdom on legal matters was to be trusted.

Could it be that he had taken an illegal potion, forever altering his magic? Could it be that this dusty corner of the library was the only place where the potion and any references to it could be found? For not the first time that night, he wished Hermione hadn’t had to leave. This was the sort of situation in which she could’ve provided some semblance of impulse control, considering that he himself had none. 

Then again, most of his life had consisted of waiting for terror and then having to deal with said terror by himself because all qualified adults were busy doing fuck-all. Could anyone really blame him if he was a bit batty?

There was nothing for it; if he had to use this new magic and didn’t have any help, he would simply have to experiment with it. Quickly, Harry replaced the bottle back in the book compartment, set the book haphazardly onto a shelf, and grabbed his invisibility cloak. Only, when he held it, he was already invisible.

His brain short-circuited. What even?

Harry looked into the dark window curiously, picking up and putting down the cloak a few times to test it out. Each time, the result was unchanged. Shrugging, Harry slung the book bag over one shoulder, grabbed the cloak in one hand, and headed off. He wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth - after all, even he had to catch a break sometimes, right? 

________________________________________

The prefect’s bathroom was meant as a way to relax after the long hours of work and patrolling that each prefect was required to do. The teachers only knew too well what it was like dealing with snotty children day in, day out. It was probably especially taxing for the prefects, considering that they, unlike teachers, didn’t hold much respect in the students’ eyes. Some students, like the infamous Weasley twins, even saw it as their personal mission to mess with them as frequently as possible.

So, it was both a reward (or an apology – whichever way you chose to interpret it) and a way to socialize. As such, the password changed only a few times a year. What was the point of a place of relaxation if you could never get in it? Harry, however, didn’t know this. 

“Pine Fresh” was a lucky guess, but he was admitted once more. He didn’t know who was in charge of the passwords in Hogwarts, but they certainly weren’t great at their job. If you guessed enough ridiculous candies – voila – you were in the headmaster’s office. Trying to get into Slytherin? Based on his one prior experience, all you had to do was guess a pretentious cliché. Seriously, you didn’t even have to be a Slytherin to guess that load of bollocks. The only thing missing was making Gryffindor’s next password “chivalry”. 

Harry sure loved Hogwarts, more than any place really (except perhaps the Burrow) but sometimes he wanted to roll his eyes at the chaos that was its administration.

This time, he was much more efficient in figuring out all the knobs and things scattered about the tub, and soon enough, he was treading in the giant space. No one needed to know if he had tried to replicate the smell of the Haitian sunrise bath bomb he’d nicked off of Ron once. Nor did they need to know that Ron owned such things in the first place, but that was beside the point.

How exactly would one go about making water an effective substitute for air? From what he, Ron and Hermione had read, the best bet was some form of transfiguration. Harry was usually pants at transfig, but he figured that if he could effectively stop time, he could totally do some sort of self-transfiguration. So, what could he transfigure himself into, and still be able to think?

He sat treading for a long while, until the playful mermaid mural on the wall gave him an idea. There were Merfolk in the lake, and by the message they left, Harry was certain they were intelligent. The only thing left to do was establish how exactly he would change legs to a tail and lungs to gills.

He assumed, if he were to have a tail and not legs, the change would somehow mold from his original limbs until they just… shifted, and he could power through the water as effortlessly as he could ride a broomstick through the air. And the more he thought about it, the more he could picture it, the more he could actually feel his tail beating the water down and keeping him afloat.

“Bloody hell” he whispered. “I was right.”

Harry looked down, and sure enough, he had a fully-fledged Merman tail, the same electric green shade of his eyes.  
He spent a few seconds just trying to process what had happened, when something began to stick in his throat. He felt like he had gargled sand or screamed for an hour straight. Harry gulped, gasped, and finally began choking before he realized that he was breathing in air.

He was such a moron. Sometimes he wondered if Hermione was right and he really did only have two brain cells.

Let’s think about changing our lungs to gills and conveniently forget that that means we can’t breathe air. Great plan, Harry, really.

For a minute he entertained the thought of how hilariously ironic it would be if he chocked to death while trying to figure out how to  
breathe underwater. Then he wondered if maybe he was a little morbid for a fourteen-year-old. Meh.

He wasn’t a human anymore, at least for the time being, and as soon as that thought entered his mind, it seemed to twist and pull at his limbs until his head was fully submerged under it. With his first gulp of water, the burning subsided and he swam easily to the deeper side of the tub, where he stilled. Well, he certainly knew how to survive in the lake for an hour.

**Author's Note:**

> I swear y'all when I was going through the different Harry slashs I... saw things. Things no human should be subjected to. All y'all nasties stay away from Harry Potter. He's a hilarious cinnamon roll, don't @ me.


End file.
